Fighting some spam today

We’ve got a CAPTCHA installed now, on new user registration. Hopefully this will do the trick. Thanks again,

We’re continuing to battle an onslaught of spam registrations; the captcha isn’t helping much, but I’ve moved on to more advanced IP bannings.

(With IP banning, there’s the remote possibility that some legitimate users may be sharing IP addresses with spammers; if you find yourself inadvertently banned, please don’t take it personally, and just let us know at support@lightstalkers.org.)

Interesting.

When I first suggested the implementation of Captcha verification to help fight spam and robo-scams,
a person who I will not name called me a paranoid ‘dog’ and then continued to call me unprofessional for making the suggestion.

Shinji, evil robots have become smarter and more sophisticated,
but it could be that it’s scores of actual people who are spamming LS
who can actually read the Captcha word verification..

There’s people in other countries who do the same thing on Craigslist to try to gather personal information on Americans in particular so as to commit identity theft.

Believe me, I’ve done a lot of research on this as of recent.

Because it’s often real people doing the spamming and scamming,
they can bypass the Captcha word verification process with relative ease.

Captcha isn’t a 100% solution, no. What we’re doing is a combination of captcha, email verification, and network banning; as of today it seems to be doing the trick.

Some members of the site have been very helpful by reporting new spam to support@lightstalkers.org; if you see anything, report it to that address right away and we’ll take care of it.

Thanks, Shinji, for fighting the good battle for the community. It is much appreciated…..

My pleasure — I have another update tonight. We’ve hardened our defenses against CSRF and reset tokens; this should help. As always, if you see anything amiss, let us know.